Press Releases, May 9, 2012

Healthcare executive and clinical leaders have a unique opportunity to learn from Kaiser Permanente's rich experience in the delivery on integrated care at HealthLeaders Media Rounds live event, "Building ACO Foundations: Lessons from Kaiser Permanente's Integrated Delivery Model," on May 30, 2012, from 9 a.m. to Noon Pacific Time.

The event will be held at Kaiser Permanente's headquarters in Oakland, Calif., and can be attended either in person or by logging into a live webcast.

Hospital and health system leaders are scrambling today to embrace new business fundamentals from population health management to practicing "team" medicine as new ways to reduce costs and improve outcomes. But are these integration tools new? Leaders at Kaiser Permanente have been honing the skills of pre-paid, multi-specialty healthcare for more than seven decades.

Speakers for the event include: George Halvorson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente; Robert Pearl, M.D., executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group; and Benjamin Chu, M.D., group president of Kaiser Permanente Southern California and Hawaii. Leaders will reveal Kaiser's best practices for building a successful ACO by focusing on:

Using a prepaid model of care, learn to manage risk

Following a multispecialty physician group model, learn to practice team medicine in a way that meets patient care

Investing in an infrastructure of electronic health records, create a system of acting on data that enables evidence-based care

During the live event, Halvorson will describe the building blocks of ACOs. "The ACO business model has to support team care by paying for all the pieces," said Halvorson. "Then if you have the right computer system, the right care registry, and you've got the right set of caregivers, the combination of all those pieces is magical. It creates the energy and the synergy that you need to make a difference in the lives of those patients."

Event attendees will receive a free copy of a new research case study regarding Kaiser Permanente's successful ACO development, which was just published by HealthLeaders Media. For more information about this special event, including registration information, please go to http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/rounds/.

"One assumption by some leaders in fee-for-service healthcare is that what Kaiser Permanente and other integrated delivery systems do will only work for them," said Jim Molpus, Strategic Relationships Director, HealthLeaders Media. "These principles are based on universal healthcare business fundamentals that can be adapted and scaled. We're delighted that Kaiser's executive team members are willing to delve into their path to integration and share the lessons they learned with our audience."

HealthLeaders Media Rounds provide healthcare leaders with access to in-depth insights, analysis and recommendations on specific challenges facing the industry. Using a case study format, Rounds events feature an array of leaders from host facilities who collectively share insights on how they have accomplished a particular initiative. This wide-angle view provides healthcare leaders with the ability to incorporate real-world solutions learned from the event into their own systems.

About HealthLeader Media
HealthLeaders Media, a division of HCPro, Inc., is a leading multi-platform media company dedicated to meeting the business information needs of healthcare executives and professionals. As an integrated media company, HealthLeaders Media includes HealthLeaders magazine, HealthLeadersMedia.com, the HealthLeaders Media Intelligence Unit, HealthLeaders Media Rounds events, HealthLeaders Media Breakthroughs reports, and California HealthFax. All these platforms may be found online at www.healthleadersmedia.com.

*MAGNET™, MAGNET RECOGNITION PROGRAM®, and ANCC MAGNET RECOGNITION® are trademarks of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). The products and services of HCPro are neither sponsored nor endorsed by the ANCC. The acronym "MRP" is not a trademark of HCPro or its parent company.